What We’re Reading This Week – 2010-06-05

The Missing Speakers – Did you know PASS doesn’t actually control who speaks at the PASS Summit? This one floored me – Microsoft speakers are selected by Microsoft, not by PASS. If there’s a Microsoft speaker you want to hear – like Buck Woody, Cindy Gross, or Jimmy May – make your voice heard by commenting on Jeremiah’s blog. He’s a member of the PASS Board of Directors, and he may be able to help fix this issue.

The Truth About Cursors Part 3 – T-SQL genius Brad Schulz exposes an interesting optimization in SQL Server 2008: “When I insert 1 million rows into a temp table without a ‘#’ prefix, it creates 1,000,078 Log Records. But inserting rows into the temp table with a ‘#’ prefix never brings the Log Record Count higher than 400 or so.” But are cursors invited to the party?

Amazon Management Console and MySQL – the Amazon Web Services offers a Relational Database Service. It’s like an easy-to-scale MySQL in the cloud with a built-in DBA who handles some basics for you. Check out this post on how easy it is to launch a database, and think what that might mean for DBAs down the road.